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Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

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Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#281

Post by pfdietz »

ben_w wrote: post #279
pfdietz wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason people demand higher standards is history. An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it. Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors the…

Given how few people got cancer from Fukushima, this doesn't really help make the fears seem rational. One death from cancer, 2313 from relocating: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

One person identified as having gotten cancer from Fukushima. Most of the cancers would be in a larger population and could not be distinguished from the large background of cancers. That doesn't mean they didn't (or won't) happen, or that regulation must assume they didn't/won't happen. Regulation is not like criminal law; radiation is not presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#282

Post by ChatGTP »

otherme123 wrote: post #168
ChatGTP wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear plants or renewables, but going to nowhere. This effects people too. Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lo…

I had suffered the downvoting on reddit before: write something backed with data against nuclear (specially if your source is a pro-nuclear report), and in less than 5 minutes you get -10 and no replies.

People think I’m being anti-nuclear, which I not what I said. It’s just an emotional response.

I’m just stating that the cleanups are expensive, stupidly expensive and the more nuclear we have the more chance of this happening again, or worse, there will be.

Look at coal seam gas jn the US, sole plants are leaking untold levels of methane. The US can’t regulate anything properly when it comes to energy.

People don’t realise that Fukushima wasn’t caused by a tsunami, it was caused by negligence.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#283

Post by Equadex »

ianburrell wrote: post #155
zerodensity wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having excess energy is great! We can use it for alot of useful stuff. For example to: - Recycle waste products. Most (not all) things are recyclable you just need the energy. - Grow food vertically so more land can be nature. - Siphon greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. - Desalinate Water

Many of those extra things can be intermittent and shut down when excess power isn’t available. Which means can overbuild solar and wind to satisfy everything but the worst case, and use the excess most of the time. The result is that don’t need seasonal storage only daily storage. It is likely better to build more capacity than long-term storage. Although, generated fuels like hydrogen might work well for long-term…

Production facilities idleing is not free. Intermittent production means the equipment isn't generating any money while costing the owner money. Wheter this is significant depends on the cost of the facility, economic yield from production and if costs are energy dominant or not.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#284

Post by eaasen »

dang wrote: post #97
eaasen wrote: post #30

[flagged]

" Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. " " Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My apologies, this was not intended to be inflammatory but the quotes out of the article and the comments were raised to point out that these kinds of baseless and biased comments from the author detract from the objective quality of the information previously presented in the article and lower the credibility of the author and even the information that the author presents.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#285

Post by Zigurd »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #104
zokier wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out. It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact…

> It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. That’s not how things work. It’s tempting to view money in such simple term but also very wrong. In effect, the state has a lot of leeway in how it decides to invest and a lot of conservative positions are taken to preserve the overall status quo when it comes to who has power and who hasn’t.

This is exactly how capital works. You don't buy the machine that takes 10X as long to deliver, costs more, has unending waste storage liabilities, and is uninsurable.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#286

Post by pfdietz »

hedora wrote: post #131
Gwypaas wrote: post #118

After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder. It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.

The French managed to. I guess they have super-human engineering prowess. The trick is that they keep building the same obsolete US-based design instead of re-inventing the entire thing from scratch for each plant. Imagine how much more accessible computers would be if you could just copy the operating system from one "printed" circuit board to another, instead of hand-wiring all the transistors, then hand coding pro…

The French breeder program was such a "success" that it's been mothballed. They've put the work on a shelf and terminated any follow on reactor.

This tells me the French don't believe nuclear will power the world any time soon. If they believed that, they'd understand breeders would be needed, and would be working on them.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#287

Post by pfdietz »

Zealotux wrote: post #253
cycomanic wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").

Every time the fact nuclear power is subsidized is being brought up, I can't help but think of how much energy, in general, is highly subsidized, like other fossils and renewables. What makes it special in the case of nuclear?

Moving a technology down an experience curve is a positive externality. Technologies with good experience curves (like renewables) justify subsidy because of this. Nuclear, unfortunately, has not shown good experience effects.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#288

Post by cycomanic »

pyrale wrote: post #261
cycomanic wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact that french nuclear power is highly subsidized (partly by military budgets, partly other subsidies, partly by grossly underfunding for storage and decommissioning costs, which they are required to put funds aside for), is breaking at the seams last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance (picked up by "intermittent solar and wind").

> last year for some time >80% of the power generation was down in France due to maintenance Oh, so low? I heard it was 102%, and we had to activate the hamster wheels in order to make up for the deficit? Hint: Nuclear isn't even 80% of France's nuclear production when every reactor is up.

Yes and for some time 100% of France's nuclear reactors were down, either due to maintenance or heat.

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#289

Post by baybal2 »

SigmundA wrote: post #72
baybal2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And important note that relatively modern coal and gas powerplants are more thermally efficient than nuclear. Nuclear is ran in between 250C-350C, which is rather inefficient, and requires very big turbines.

Nuclear does not emit carbon when used, the waste heat means very little, emissions are what matters when discussing efficiency. Plutonium 239 is also 83,610,000 MJ/kg vs coal at 35 MJ/kg so the difference in thermal efficiency is nearly meaningless given how much specific energy density advantage nuclear has.

[dead]

Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

#290

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

Zigurd wrote: post #285
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. That’s not how things work. It’s tempting to view money in such simple term but also very wrong. In effect, the state has a lot of leeway in how it decides to invest and a lot of conservative positions are taken to preserve the overall status quo when it comes to who has power and who hasn’t.

This is exactly how capital works. You don't buy the machine that takes 10X as long to deliver, costs more, has unending waste storage liabilities, and is uninsurable.

No, it’s clearly not how it works.

National scale investment like the power grid are not subject to the same kind of rules that classical investment because the state can and do print money. For all the bad things I have to say about the Inflation Reduction Act for exemple, it will result in significant investment in renewable with money which for all intent and purpose appeared out of thin air (with all the impact this will have on the overall equilibrium of the economy).

You could have at the same time have a comprehensive investment plan for nuclear and renewable without one significantly impacting the funding of the other. The US would be labour and knowledge limited long before it is capital starved.

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